Hamilton Leithauser
This Side of the Island
GLASSNOTE
Twelve years into his band’s extended hiatus (they did tour in 2023), seven years into lush annual residencies at NYC’s capitol of cabaret, Café Carlyle, and five years after his fam-heavy latest solo record The Loves of Your Life, Hamilton Leithauser has found an exquisite blend of raspy, lounge-lizard crooning and angsty Walkmen art-rocking on his newest album, This Side of the Island. Not that Loves and its predecessor, 2016’s Rostam collaboration I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, weren’t great, but they weren’t riveting, weren’t dynamic. Now, in the guise of suspicion, the fright of uncertainty, and the world-weariness of a guy with kids in yet another time of cholera, Leithauser sings ire-driven, interpersonal phrases such as “Our love and our city were built to collapse” with the conviction of a man ripped from the sanity, comfort, and symmetry of those earlier solo efforts—yet still remains empathetic.
Co-produced by Leithauser, The National’s Aaron Dessner (post–Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams credits), and Hamilton’s wife, sound expert Anna Stumpf, This Side of the Island features gutsier melodies, gustier vocals, groovier rhythms, and a distressed lyricism that manages to portray black humor and love’s angry angles without losing Leithauser’s usual good-guy optimism. Seriously, have you ever heard anyone say they don’t like Hamilton Leithauser? No way. As a Walkman and as a stand-up soloist, he’s become the John Mulaney of the indie-rock world, or even—as I’ve also written of Neil Tennant and Rufus Wainwright—Noel Coward in a leather bar.
Sonically, Hamilton’s Island is hot with cosmopolitan percussive moves and the ripples of small-combo jazzy orchestration on “What Do You Think” and “Ocean Roar,” while leaving room for snaky slide guitars and near-country swing on “I Was Right.” Yet for all of his and his collaborators’ calls for saxophones and xylophones, Leithauser’s expressive voice is his own best instrument, one that—on a mini-big guitar epic such as “Knockin’ Heart”—shows off more sensual color and passionate emotion than we’ve heard from him since Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, with lovestruck lyrics like “There’s no one who’s gonna need you like I do tonight.”
